About Rationally Speaking

Rationally Speaking is a blog maintained by Prof. Massimo Pigliucci, a philosopher at the City University of New York. The blog reflects the Enlightenment figure Marquis de Condorcet's idea of what a public intellectual (yes, we know, that's such a bad word) ought to be: someone who devotes himself to "the tracking down of prejudices in the hiding places where priests, the schools, the government, and all long-established institutions had gathered and protected them." You're welcome. Please notice that the contents of this blog can be reprinted under the standard Creative Commons license.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Aristotle vs Rawls and the meaning of fairness, part II

by Massimo Pigliucci

Last time we took a look at a somewhat nasty debate between Stephen Asma and Marilyn Piety about the moral defensibility of a general (i.e., universal) doctrine of fairness. Asma, adopting what is essentially a virtue ethical standpoint, claims that it is not just impossible in practice, but undesirable in (moral) theory to have equal concern for all human beings. Piety, defending Rawls' contractarian concept of justice as fairness, thinks that Asma's positions are not only philosophically indefensible, but downright repugnant. So, as someone who has written favorably about both virtue ethics and Rawls, what am I supposed to take from this?

Let's begin by reviewing what I find so attractive about these two seemingly incompatible approaches to ethics, and then consider in what sense, I believe, they can actually be thought of as complementary (though probably both Rawls and Aristotle would object to that. What the hell, they're both dead anyway).

Virtue ethics first. As I explained before, the idea is to figure out how to live a eudaimonic life, i.e. the sort of life one can look back at near the end and feel justly satisfied by. For Aristotle, this was a moral life, not one characterized by the pursuit of money, fame and material possessions (though all of these are actually good, in moderation). An essential component of the eudaimonic life is the cultivation of the virtues, which include things like courage, temperance, truthfulness, friendliness, and so forth.

For Aristotle, as for Asma, this was a combination of appreciating human nature (how things are) and trying one's best with what that nature entails (how things ought to be). The ancient Greeks, therefore, would have been somewhat befuddled by Piety's dismissal of Asma on the grounds that he confuses is and ought. The point isn't to simplistically say "X comes natural to humans, therefore X is good" (that truly would be an egregious example of the naturalistic fallacy). Rather, the project is to start with what comes naturally and to build on it: to curtail the nasty stuff and to nurture the good things, engaging in a sort of gardening of the human character.

Virtue ethics is intrinsically non-egalitarian, which is the thing of course that highly disturbed Piety in her response to Asma. Quite aside from the Greeks' idea that it is morally necessary to pursue excellence (but why not, really?), there is also an emphasis on taking care of one's family and friends above others. That is because the strength of those relationships are crucial to the eudaimonic life, and because characteristics like loyalty (which is asymmetric by definition, since one cannot be loyal to everyone) are moral virtues.

How does all of this square with Rawls-style egalitarianism? At first glance, not well at all. Rawls derived his theory of justice from his famous thought experiment of the veil of ignorance. Ask yourself what sort of society you would build if you could start from scratch. However, before you begin, also imagine that you don't know anything about what sort of person you will end up being in that society. You don't know whether you'll be a man or a woman, rich or poor, smart or dumb, attractive or ugly, and so on. What you do know is basic information about general human desires (safety, shelter, food) and some relevant scientific and economic facts (there are no such things as unlimited space and resources, can't just print money to solve problems).

Rawls' bet is that under those conditions the rational thing to do would be to build a society that is as fair as possible, with the lowest possible degree of inequality among its members. This, incidentally, is not a new argument in favor of communism, as Rawls does admit the likely necessity of some degree of inequality. He, however, thinks that a departure from equality ought (morally) to be justified. For instance, it is acceptable for, say, doctors to make more money than people working in most other professions, for the reasons that a) doctors are highly valuable to society and b) it takes a large initial investment of time and resources to actually become a doctor.

You may or may not think Rawls' society is actually just, but it turns out that the Rawlsian scenario, just like the eudaimonic one, has some significant factual evidence to back it up (oh no! more blurring of the line between is and ought!!). As I detailed in Answers for Aristotle, for instance, international surveys of both self-reported life satisfaction and objective (i.e., third person) measures of happiness agree that the more a country approaches the Rawlsian ideal, the better off its citizens both feel and actually are. You guessed it, the top of the list is occupied by European countries, particularly Scandinavian ones.

So people, it turns out, are happier when they behave according to virtue ethics (e.g., strong family and friendship bonds) and when they live in countries that have adopted a Rawls-style social contract (less inequality, more access to common resources). It also turns out that one can make philosophical arguments in favor of either virtue ethics or contractarianism. But how can we reconcile the two? Surely Aristotle's Athens was nothing like Sweden! Interestingly, though, a major characteristic of life in many European countries is that people do practice and value family ties and friendships, despite living in an otherwise Rawlsian environment.

And that observation is a major clue to how I think the two perspectives can be reconciled. You see, an even more sharp distinction between Ancient Greek ethics and the modern version is that Aristotle and co. were actually trying to answer a different question from what preoccupies modern day utilitarians, deontologists and the like. We are concerned with what is the right thing to do. That, to us moderns, is what morality is all about. But this would have been puzzling to the ancient Greeks. They thought that the point of moral philosophy was to answer the question of what sort of life one ought to live. The two are related, given certain assumptions, but they are certainly not the same.

We can then begin to see, perhaps, why Aristotle and Rawls may not be so antithetic after all. If they are actually answering two different questions, maybe there is a philosophically sound way of combining the two. I think there is, and it has to do with the difference between a personal ethics that applies locally and a societal ethics that applies globally.

In the Republic, Plato famously made the argument that if one wishes to know what a good State looks like one has to ask what a good person is like. But this was a mistake (which, in fact, resulted in some fascinating but bizarre ideas about philosopher kings and all that stuff). There is no necessary connection between the answer to what makes for a eudaimonic life and the answer to what makes for a just society. The point of view is necessarily different: in the first case we are talking about an individual human being who cannot (in practice), nor probably should (according to virtue ethics) treat everyone the same way. In the second case, however, we are taking the standpoint of the laws regulating a community at large. Of course those laws ought to be fair and treat everyone equally.

So yes, I think I am entitled to eat my virtue ethical cake and to want a Rawls-like state as well. To go back to an example I sketched in the previous post, there is no contradiction for me to want society (in the sense of the laws that regulate our affairs) to treat my daughter fairly, the way all other human beings ought to be treated, and at the same time giving her my preference, concentating my resources (time, affection, money) on her instead of spreading them across society. Heck, I feel so good about this Aristotle-Rawls compromise that I'm going to give it a special name: virtue contractarianism. And now let the debate broaden...

49 comments:

Equality before the law is a principle which even conservatives support. I was going to make the case that the compatibility you are arguing for would be strained if the egalitarianism were pushed too far. But then I remembered that Alastair MacIntyre (who probably did more than anyone to revive the Aristotelian tradition) was a Marxist!

>The point isn't to simplistically say "X comes natural to humans, therefore X is good" (that truly would be an egregious example of the naturalistic fallacy). Rather, the project is to start with what comes naturally and to build on it: to curtail the nasty stuff and to nurture the good things<

But, why build on something if it has nothing to qualify its virtue other than being natural? Piety is complaining that Asma says nothing of *why* it is good -- other than “we tend to do it”. We have to first show that it is good before we nurture it.

>…there is also an emphasis on taking care of one's family and friends above others. That is because the strength of those relationships are crucial to the eudaimonic life, and because characteristics like loyalty (which is asymmetric by definition, since one cannot be loyal to everyone) are moral virtues.<

But what evidence (other than the Greeks may have *said* so) do we have that regarding friends and family above others really *is* crucial to the eudaimonic life? Why should we regard “loyalty” as one of the virtues? This is circular reasoning. High regard of family is good because it is good (or leads to the good life), and “loyalty” is good because it promotes the rise of your selected group above other groups (competitive groups having previously been defined as good). But what shows that the system as a whole is sound, or superior to other systems? Loyalty to your “in” group may be sound policy when set in a context of dog-eat-dog competition, but what if we take the whole system apart and start from a “tabla rasa”?

> But, why build on something if it has nothing to qualify its virtue other than being natural?

I don't think Asma or Massimo meant to say we shoud nurture something BECAUSE this thing is natural. Rather, I guess they mean that it's important to look at human nature as it really is so we can know exactly what are the good things of our nature and how to nurture them properly - and I find important to have in mind that there are individual limits when it comes to changing human nature, so we don't fall into the mistake of thinking in terms of "tabula rasa" (also, I think it helps to clear out the problem you seem to have with human competition, since it's in some degree an unsolvable problem*).

*Of course it doesn't mean *every* competition within human relations are unchangeable or can't have a reduced degree of intensity. I only mean that this competition feeling is something hardwired in our nature and I just don't think we can get rid of all of it.

I would go further and argue that there is much to learn from nature in general, not just 'human nature'. Just because we see a pattern in nature that 'is' doesn't imply we 'ought' try to follow it. On the other-hand there are some patterns in nature that lend themselves to a type of stability that allows flourishing at both micro and macro levels. These patterns that exhibit flourishing on multiple levels can often be contrasted based on how the interests of the levels seem to overcome apparent conflict.

Helio & Steven: I appreciate your comments. But, who is to say what the “good things” of nature really are? Why should competition be considered a virtue and not cooperation?

My complaint is that Asma’s selection of “virtues” is arbitrary, there is no discussion as to the *degree* each virtue should be exercised, or an evaluation of the relative merits of the virtues, or the consequences to society as a whole that results from the individual exercise of a particular so-called "virtue".

In short, Asma’s book is shoddy scholarship and I can’t believe that Massimo is giving him a pass on such tripe.

When speaking of “table rasa” I meant we should not assume anything in the selections of what is to be called natural or called a “virtue”. For example, is it *really* true that competition is hardwired into our nature – or is that simply how most of us are brought up? When you are in a society of dog-eat-dog competition, it can seem suicidal to think non-competitively and you begin to assume that it is your natural state.

I agree that the patterns we observe in nature can give us insight, but I think Piety's criticism is on target -- as Asma's book is heavily larded with anecdotes and arguments from authority, with very little in the way of justification for his crack-pot philosophy.

Tom, determining what in our nature should be seen as virtue and what should be seen as a negative moral aspect is another story. Nevertheless, I think you attacked a strawman here, because nowhere in Massimo's article or in my comment there's the suggestion that competition should be treated as a virtue. All I said is that competition is a part of human nature, and that having that in mind will allow us to come to a better and clearer moral reasoning.

As for your complaint, I don't think there's a virtue that can be selected free of arbitrarity. But also, I don't think there's an *inherent* problem with it if the reason why selecting X virtue has a proper justification (which obviously has to have a strong logical structure internally).

I can't help feeling that Asma has a covert political agenda of justifying even greater greed and selfishness by cloaking his argument in the guise of an abstract discussion of virtue ethics. Our comments, after all, have context. The problem of excessive altruism -- people denying their own children a pair of shoes in order to confer benefits to some stranger -- is not exactly the foremost problem society faces today. In contrast, a world of greed in which the top 1% take nearly all the benefits of society is a reality.

Asma knocks down a straw man. He creates a scenario in which a *single* altruistic person is frantically running around trying to cure all the evils of the world by deciding how best to allocate the funds for a pair of shoes -finding one greater need after another -- a ridiculous picture that no one advocates. As MLK said, "we must act with all of the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision and capability...but we must act".

Asma's vision is of a single island of altruism set in a sea of greed and competitiveness. He says nothing of a changed *world*, in which *all* people would gradually move from a dog-eat-dog mindset to a more caring and egalitarian system.

To use Massimo's example, suppose that he didn't have to *worry* about providing education funding for his daughter because education was provided free for anyone who desires it (instead of a system of "education for the rich" and "devil take the hindmost"). Suppose Massimo's daughter could engage in education for its own sake and didn't have to focus on getting a degree in order to be competitive on the job market -- because she lived in a society where dignified work is available to all.

Perhaps some would criticize my scenario a being utopian and unworkable, but please remember that freeing America's slaves was once thought to be utopian and unworkable as well.

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend youFrom seasons such as these? O, I have ta'enToo little care of this! Take physic, pomp;Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,That thou mayst shake the superflux to themAnd show the heavens more just.” - --King Lear

I didn’t read either Asma’s or Piety’s papers. I assume I got the gist of what they wrote from your explanation of their conflict. I agree with you that Piety seemed unkind, unjust and unprofessional in her response to Asma’s paper.

You have a good handle on the link between our direct and indirect relationships. Rawls is describing what the general character of our indirect relationships ought to be. Asma was describing the character of our direct relationships. Friendship is natural for us. It is also an ideal that the virtuous person tries to develop so he can be a good friend, the kind of friend we would all like to have. But this sense of justice that underlies our indirect relationships is also the foundation for our direct relations. If your daughter had a little brother or sister you would have to treat them both equally or you wouldn’t feel like (or appear to others to be) a good father. The Christian ideals of love and forgiveness refer to both our direct and indirect relations. You can only be friends with, love and forgive the people you know. However, if you should come across someone who was beaten and robbed and lying on the side of the road, the virtuous way to act would be to do what the Good Samaritan did.

> why build on something if it has nothing to qualify its virtue other than being natural? <

Because I think that a system of ethics that doesn’t take into account human nature, desires and preferences is a no starter. Remember, the idea is to build on the basics, not to limit oneself to the basics.

> Asma says nothing of *why* it is good -- other than “we tend to do it”. We have to first show that it is good before we nurture it. <

Everyone can play the foundational game, and everybody loses. You have to start somewhere, and I happen to think that virtue ethics is a very good start for personal ethics (while Rawls-style contractarianism is a good approach at the level of society).

> what evidence (other than the Greeks may have *said* so) do we have that regarding friends and family above others really *is* crucial to the eudaimonic life? <

Actually, there is evidence. A number of studies have shown that strong family and friendship ties are a crucial component of human well being.

> I can't help feeling that Asma has a covert political agenda of justifying even greater greed and selfishness by cloaking his argument in the guise of an abstract discussion of virtue ethics. <

I’d rather not second guess motives and stick to what he writes. At any rate, I certainly don’t have that agenda, and I still think virtue ethics is a good idea.

> suppose that he didn't have to *worry* about providing education funding for his daughter because education was provided free for anyone who desires it (instead of a system of "education for the rich" and "devil take the hindmost"). <

It doesn’t matter, my daughter still (rightly) expects special attention from me, on the ground that she is dependent on me and that I brought her into the world. (Incidentally, I grew up in a country where education is free, so my parents didn’t have to worry about that, but it would have been abysmal if they had therefore divided their attention equally between their children and every other child in the world - not to mention, of course, impossible).

>Everyone can play the foundational game, and everybody loses. You have to start somewhere<

Indeed, but Asma doesn’t acknowledge that HIS start is very selective, completely arbitrary, and that other foundational selections of what may be called “virtue” (“cooperation” instead of “loyalty”) may work as well or better.

>I happen to think that virtue ethics is a very good start for personal ethics (while Rawls-style contractarianism is a good approach at the level of society).<

But Asma pushes his advocacy of greed and selfishness to the societal level – asserting his right to exterminate the entire population to achieve his personal goals.

>a system of ethics that doesn’t take into account human nature, desires and preferences is a no starter<

No one is saying that you shouldn’t take human nature into account, but Asma is attacking Enlightenment values and calling it scholarship (scholarship that cites “The Little Red Hen” as evidence). Intellectuals should be held accountable for the likely consequences of what they advocate.

In “Apocalypse Now” Kurtz recounts:

>We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us … We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. …And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God... the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that -- these were not monsters, these were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that.<

Kutz is essentially playing the same game as Asma, taking something monsterous, like hacking off arms and calling it “genius”, “ will-power” or “strength” under the rubric of Virtue Ethics. Asma takes greed and selfishness (to the point of Asma being willing to exterminate the whole population in order to fulfill his own goals, as he brags about in his book) and tries to pass them off as the “virtue” of being loyal to kin.

I can’t believe that you are promoting this warmed-over Nietzschean crypto-fascism on your web-site.

I agree whole-heartily that something like virtue ethics and utilitarianism can complement each other at a certain intersection of the the two ideas. I also think the predominance of one concept with regard to the other may make sense in varying proportions when viewed from different perspectives (individual vs society, or local vs global).

I would not go so far however as to suggest that virtue ethics is best for individuals and utilitarianism (or contractarianism) is best for societies. I think what is best is to explore how each concept naturally constrains the other and perhaps somewhat differently at each level.

I have no doubt it is true that individuals living in societies with more equal income distribution enjoy more eudaimonia. This does not mean a flat-line income distrubution is close to ideal. I think it more likely points to the general trend of income inequality to spiral to unhealty levels. I think an ideal society however would still have income inequality to a degree due to the constraint imposed from healthy bottom-up incentives rewarding motivated individuals whose hard work to benefit the society.

Similarly I think individuals would benefit most not solely from a virtue ethics perspective, but also from seeing how the larger circle concept can constrain individuals in a benfecial way.

Hey Massimo,I have heard you say on more than one occasion that emotional intelligence is important, but it hardly figures into your ethics. My guess is this is because you come to philosophy via science rather than the arts. I got this impression when you used the invention of 3-point perspective as an example of “progress in the arts”. You didn’t say a thing about the values expressed by the artist feeling real rather than sentimental or phony.

Our personal relationships are important because we value them – a lot. It’s almost comical to hear talk about “evidence” to support the notion that friends and family are a crucial component of human wellbeing. If you are anything like me (and one of the reasons I like you so much is because your politics and values seem so much like my own) then there is no question in your mind that you would give your life to save your daughter’s. If you asked your daughter why you give her special attention, I doubt she would say it’s because she is dependent upon you and because you brought her into the world, even though that’s all factual. If she is anything like my daughter, she’d say it’s because you love her. You value her as much and in some ways more than you value your own life.

That relationships are important is something to be felt, not something to be argued or supported by evidence. The skeptic community seems to gravitate toward intellectualism and scientistic thinking. Like Sam Harris you seem to want to “collapse values into facts”. The important thing about is/ought is you can’t get to values and expressions of how things ought to be via descriptions of the way things are. We can discover logical relationships in the facts and things we experience in the world, but we can’t use logical analysis and the rules governing those logical relationships to move from fact to value. You are wrong when you say ethics is logic. You always begin with axioms as if they are a first guess at something we can consider universally binding. Then you move to logical analysis to unpack the implications of that first guess. What ethics is really about is the process of discovering and refining your axiom. It is a fist guess, but it is a part of a dialogue between you and the rest of us regarding what is truly important. The artist may be obsessed with an aspect of something thing she holds dear and she isolates it to draws our attention to it and suggest how important it is. This is her way of joining into the dialogue and putting in her two-cents.

My guess is that you are confusing ethics with law. The logical analysis you are referring to is the development of a set of laws by translating agreed upon values into axioms into laws and discovering the implications of those laws.

Here is Kenan Malik arguing that ethics and values are developed via dialogue. In this case the dialogue happens via the democratic process:

“Democracy does not tell us what values are good, or how we may come upon them. But it does provide a method of debating such questions. And it provides a means of implementing change. This is why, in many cases, democracy will lead to unpalatable results. It is also why in the long run values that emerge through a democratic process are likely to be both more humane and more robust than those imposed from without. Democracy allows us to get away from the idea of values as eternally fixed, and yet to see them as potentially universal.”

I can very well understand why people find virtue ethics attractive. We're not rational agents and we are definitely not expected utility maximizers. We probably don't even have a utility function. So virtue ethics is probably a good way to justify doing things that have bad consequences. It's obvious that unfairness has bad consequences, but since we can't be fair, let's call being unfair a virtue.

What I can't understand is how could you say there's no conflict between virtue ethics and contractarianism? If I am the ruler of North Korea, Libya or any other place like that, there's no rule of law. I am the law. So if favouring your kith and kin is a virtue, why shoudn't I become a nepotist? In fact, I should become a nepotist since I would be less virtuous if didn't favour my kith and kin when I could.

So what does virtue contractarianism tells us? That we should be virtuous when we don't have power but should be less virtuous when we have power?

It seems to me that the relationship between ethics and politics is at the heart of this discussion. Do we try to derive our politics from our ethics? Or our ethics from our politics? Or see them as more or less separate and independent? Or not separate at all, ethics seamlessly blending into politics and politics into ethics?

Virtue ethics (or versions thereof) would seem to be compatible with the first, third and fourth of these options. It is a very flexible framework. (Too flexible?)

Alasdair MacIntyre's version of virtue ethics encompasses a radical critique of classical liberal and Enlightenment values. For him ethics and politics are closely aligned. Massimo Pigliucci, on the other hand, takes a more pragmatic and science-based approach (and separates ethics and politics).

My own preference would be for a more integrated view of ethics and politics than Massimo is proposing here, but I certainly prefer his approach to MacIntyre's (which is not only politically radical, but based on medieval metaphysics and theology).

The goal of a fully integrated social philosophy which does justice to the findings of science may be impossible to achieve, in fact. Since our natural moral instincts did not evolve for dealing with large, complex societies, I guess there is always going to be a disjunction of sorts between how we deal with small-scale interactions, on the one hand, and large-scale interactions on the other.

> If you asked your daughter why you give her special attention, I doubt she would say it’s because she is dependent upon you and because you brought her into the world, even though that’s all factual. If she is anything like my daughter, she’d say it’s because you love her. <

Of course, but that’s not an argument, it’s a feeling. And contra the general gist of your comment, I do think ethics needs reasoned arguments, not just emotions. The problem with relying only on emotions is that people have all sorts of strong feelings about all sorts of things, many of which are actually ethically questionable (think, for instance, the strong feeling of distrust or even revulsion a lot of people have for anyone who looks different from themselves).

> The skeptic community seems to gravitate toward intellectualism and scientistic thinking. Like Sam Harris you seem to want to “collapse values into facts”. <

If you read a bit more of this blog you will find out that I am a harsh critic of both scientism and Sam Harris.

> What ethics is really about is the process of discovering and refining your axiom. It is a fist guess, but it is a part of a dialogue between you and the rest of us regarding what is truly important. <

That is correct, but if that process and dialogue doesn’t use reason what is it based on, might?

> My guess is that you are confusing ethics with law. <

I assure you that the distinction is very clear in my mind.

brainoil,

> What I can't understand is how could you say there's no conflict between virtue ethics and contractarianism? If I am the ruler of North Korea, Libya or any other place like that, there's no rule of law. I am the law. So if favouring your kith and kin is a virtue, why shoudn't I become a nepotist? <

Did you entirely miss the part where I made the distinction between personal and societal ethics? First off, any decent societal ethical system cannot be implemented when there is a “ruler,” so your example is automatically out of the question. In the case of democratically elected leaders, the trick is to balance devotion to one’s family with fairness at the level of public actions. This isn’t that strange, you don’t think that’s exactly what Obama tries to do every day?

Mark,

> It seems to me that the relationship between ethics and politics is at the heart of this discussion. Do we try to derive our politics from our ethics? <

In my mind ethics always comes first, though doing politics of course means engaging in pragmatic compromises - up to a point.

Okay, let's take a hypothetical situation which is indeed very much possible (just so you don't accuse me of coming up with impossible thought experiments). Some crazy group of people kidnaps Obama's wife and kids, and threatens to torture, rape and finally kill them if he doesn't give them thing-X. But if he gives them thing-X, they'd use it to kill two thousand white kids by blowing up few schools, and Obama cannot prevent that.

Now my question isn't what he should do. My question is, wouldn't he become less virtuous if he decided to let his wife and kids be raped and murdered in order to save two thousand white kids he doesn't even know?

I am with you on eating the virtue ethical cake and having a Rawls-like state as well. To reject one of these two would be like rejecting one of our brain hemispheres. The left hemisphere provides a sharp and narrow focus of consciousness, presumably along with a sense of narrowly defined self; the right hemisphere provides a broader awareness and a sense of connection with a larger community.

Both perspectives seem necessary for survival and healthy life; one has to care for one's individuality and close surroundings as well as for a broader environment. But since our cognitive resources are limited we cannot attend to the broad environment with the same sharpness as we would to a small collection of details. The broader awareness is more hazy, intuitive, unconscious and so it seems wise to design mechanisms like social laws and institutions that help us regulate the many relationships in a society. Such a regulation should foster universal fairness and mutual help but also acknowledge individual distinctions, in a healthy balance.

It is one of the points I tried to raise in the first part of this series: any idea can be ridiculed by taking it to an extreme.

Look how often Asma uses superlatives in his writing (marked by “**”):

>One of the more deeply engrained assumptions of Western liberalism is that we humans can *indefinitely* increase our capacity to care for others, that we can, with the right effort and dedication, extend our care to wider and wider circles *until we envelop the whole species* within our ethical regard.<

>They [Rifkin/Singer] have different prescriptions for arriving at ethical *utopia*.<

>Like mathematics, which can continue its recursive operations *infinitely* upward…<

>Singer seems to be suggesting that I arrive at *perfect* egalitarian ethics by first accepting *perfect* egalitarian metaphysics.<

>Singer has famously pushed the logic further, arguing that we should do *everything within our power* to help strangers…<

>In the utilitarian calculus, needs *always* trump enjoyments.<

> …I’ll need to sell the tennis shoes too; *and on, and on, and on*.<

>…the idea that we can *infinitely* stretch our domain of care.<

> …quixotic view that empathy is an almost *limitless* reserve. <

> He sketches a progressive, *ever widening* evolution of empathy.<

[Well, that’s not all of them, but I got tired of doing these – look for yourself!

Also, as Phiwilli noted, the problem has historically been too much inequality rather than too much generosity (accompanied by too little regard for kin).]

Yes! I love the whole idea of virtue contracarianism. That the state should pursue morality in a different way than the individual seems like the essence of anti-totalitarianism. It makes good sense. The veil of ignorance is a question of how one would set up the state, not how one would choose to live. Great. But the name is too academic. You've got to get more punchy or suffer obscurity. I wouldn't focus on the combined theories, but on the combination and separation of them. I would call it

I’m sorry Massimo I didn’t mean to insult you and I never meant to imply that ethics doesn’t require thoughtful reflection. I thought my comment was thoughtful and reasoned. I pointed out that you have referred to emotional intelligence but I can’t figure out how in your approach to ethics emotional intelligence comes into play. I know you are a harsh critic of Sam Harris and scientism. It was your review of the Moral Landscape that first caught my eye and turned me on to your blog. Still from what I gather from your talks on ethics you do not know how to deal with the emotional component of value. Values are related to facts. We can separate the emotional and factual aspects for the sake of analysis but if all we do is deal with the facts, then we have not adequately dealt with values. If that is all we do then we have essentially collapsed the value into a fact the way Harris tried to do in the Moral Landscape.

Reason expresses itself in our emotions as well as our intellect. Just as we can think thoughts that are not true we can also feel emotions that are not real. All thoughts and feelings require verification. The strong feelings of distrust and revulsion you refer to above more often than not cannot be verified and the feelings change. 50 years ago in this country many white men felt revulsion at the thought of being friends with a black man. Today friendships between whites and blacks are common. Rather than projecting feelings of revulsion onto people who look different from ourselves we have learned to know them as they truly are.

How do you reconcile what Kenan Malik is saying about "values that emerge through a democratic process are likely to be both more humane and more robust than those imposed from without" with your ethics where one man is thinking up axioms for the rest of us and then unpacking the implications? Where does this dialogue he is referring to fit in with your system?

Massimo seems to consider emotions dictionarally as "a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others." And "instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished from reasoning or knowledge." Or as he said above, "it’s a feeling." Damasio tells us however that "we are working more intensely with social feelings such as sympathy, shame or pride--they form a foundation for morality." In other words feelings would serve our moral purposes - if we had any, that is.

> Some crazy group of people kidnaps Obama's wife and kids, and threatens to torture, rape and finally kill them if he doesn't give them thing-X. But if he gives them thing-X, they'd use it to kill two thousand white kids by blowing up few schools, and Obama cannot prevent that. <

I have not been arguing that loyalty toward your kins trumps everything. Nor, for that matter, would Aristotle. The ancient Greeks sacrificed themselves and their kin all the times in the name of higher ideals.

Tom,

> Asma doesn’t acknowledge that HIS start is very selective, completely arbitrary, and that other foundational selections of what may be called “virtue” (“cooperation” instead of “loyalty”) may work as well or better. <

I seriously doubt that cooperation would be excluded by any list of good traits. Asma doesn’t actually give a list, Aristotle does, you can find it in the Nicomachean Ethics.

> Asma pushes his advocacy of greed and selfishness to the societal level – asserting his right to exterminate the entire population to achieve his personal goals. <

Where exactly does that? Certainly not in the article I linked.

> Intellectuals should be held accountable for the likely consequences of what they advocate. <

Meaning what, exactly? He is being criticized in an open forum, what other sort of “accountability” are you talking about?

> I can’t believe that you are promoting this warmed-over Nietzschean crypto-fascism on your web-site <

I can’t believe you jumped to that characterization of either my position or Asma’s.

Patrick,

> I’m sorry Massimo I didn’t mean to insult you and I never meant to imply that ethics doesn’t require thoughtful reflection. <

No insult taken! Besides, I actually agree with most of your previous comment, I just focused on the couple of bits where we diverge.

> I pointed out that you have referred to emotional intelligence but I can’t figure out how in your approach to ethics emotional intelligence comes into play. <

I don’t actually like the term “emotional intelligence,” I think we should be talking about emotional maturity. At any rate, it fits right into a virtue ethical perspective, since the Greeks were talking about character development, and one of the characteristics of a good character is precisely emotional maturity (or “intelligence”).

> We can separate the emotional and factual aspects for the sake of analysis but if all we do is deal with the facts, then we have not adequately dealt with values. <

Correct. Which is why I reject Harris’ form of scientism. But the whole point of moral philosophy is to deal with values, not just facts.

> 50 years ago in this country many white men felt revulsion at the thought of being friends with a black man. Today friendships between whites and blacks are common. <

Again, this sort of consideration makes it all the more important that we talk about the logic of our ethical judgments, not just the emotional component.

> Where does this dialogue he is referring to fit in with your system? <

Moral philosophers have very much contributed to the dialogue in question throughout human history. Socrates was talking to the regular folks, not to other academic philosophers. And even in modern times, people like Peter Singer or Martha Nussbaum very much engage the public in an open dialogue.

In that case, if it is possible for Obama to let his wife and daughters be raped and murdered for a higher ideal and still be virtuous, that higher ideal could easily be extreme utilitarianism.

I could become an extreme utilitarian and call that a virtue. After all, Obama let his wife and daughters be murdered so that he could save his perfect state. So why can't I treat my kin a little less well in order to make the perfect world? There's no way that making the perfect state could be such an important ideal, but not making the perfect world. So extreme utilitarians are still virtuous.

This scenario reminds me of an episode of "The West Wing", in which Pres. Jed Bartlet's daughter was kidnapped by a terrorist group, at which point Bartlet stepped down, temporarily ceding the presidency to the next in line of succession (who happened to be the Speaker of the House - and a member of the opposing party). Bartlet didn't trust himself to act in the best interests of his country, as opposed to those of his own family alone.

[Spoiler alert!] Fortunately, Bartlet's daughter was still rescued, without any damage to the country (although the terrorists didn't come through so well), but the decision to go ahead with that rescue attempt nonetheless was supposedly arrived at in a more "utilitarian" (in the limited sense of "state-interested") way.

I mention this because, in this version of the kidnap scenario, I find that the president comes across looking a lot better than the one in which he lets his family "be murdered and raped for a higher ideal." Indeed, even if Bartlet's successor had decided that the rescue attempt was too risky and that the Bartlet girl would have to be sacrificed, the fact that Bartlet recused himself from that decision endears him to me in a way that the hypothetically Spock-like Obama does not.

That said, what's endearment got to do with ethics (and politics, for that matter)? If moral sentimentalists are even roughly correct (as I believe they are), then quite a lot.

After all, I didn't only vote for Obama because I perceived his ability to reason abstractly and dispassionately. I also voted for him (twice, actually) because I perceived that he shares my values (i.e. values that I hold dear), which include (but are no means limited to) care for and protection of one's family.

Simply put: Bartlet was skillful enough to reconcile his competing obligations in a way that seems intuitively more virtuous than the hypothetically Spock-like Obama - both of which are fictional characters, btw.

Yes, I was thinking about Michael Dukakis 1988 debate blunder. He was asked whether he would support the death penalty should his wife Kitty be raped and murdered. Dukakis replied "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime."

It turned out that it was too much Spock-like, whatever the merits of his position were.

@Massimo: 'I don’t actually like the term “emotional intelligence,” I think we should be talking about emotional maturity.'

Damasio tells us that emotional feelings are evidence of intelligent reactions, and that we couldn't think analytically about our daily circumstances without them.And it would also appear that we can't consider maturity on an analytical level if we weren't discussing the intelligent aspects of our less conscious emotional analysis.

And if Massimo really thinks we (and thus he) should be talking about emotional maturity, I presume that one of these days he'll actually discuss that subject here.Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume have all philsophical theories of emotion, or so I'm told. And accordig to the essay at SEP, emotions (or at least many of them) are adaptations whose purpose is to solve basic ecological problems facing organisms (Plutchik 1980; Frank 1988). Is fairness connected in any way to ecology? I'd say so, if there were environmental purposes involved with human activity.

you seem to be confused about virtue ethics vs utilitarianism. First of all, nothing that we have been discussing has anything to do with a “perfect” world, whatever that means. Second, for a utilitarian the concept of virtue makes no sense at all. Utilitarianism is not about character, it is about maximizing “utility” (usually increasing happiness and decreasing pain) overall. Utilitarians *always* treat everyone exactly as everyone else, so the idea of a virtuous utilitarian is an oxymoron.

Tom,

first off, I’m getting a bit tired of your holier-than-though tone, please bring it down a notch or two. Second, I’m not promoting anything, I’m simply trying to wrap my mind around two interesting positions in moral philosophy. Third, no I did not read Asma’s book (or Piety’s, for that matter). it should have been clear from the first post (did you read it?) that I was using those two authors’ essays as background for my own musings about contractarianism and virtue ethics. Lastly, I went back and read those first two pages of Asma’s book, and at the very least (and not surprisingly) you read him very uncharitably. He brought up a hypothetical situation to remind people of the strong emotional attachment all mammals have to their offspring. Hardly a “justification of genocide,” as you put it.

Baron,

> Damasio tells us that emotional feelings are evidence of intelligent reactions, and that we couldn't think analytically about our daily circumstances without them. <

I’ve read Damasio, thank you. Nothing in what I said implies that emotions are not crucial for a balanced human being, nor does anything that Damasio says justify the co-opting of the term “intelligence” and its substitution for the term “maturity” when referring to emotions.

Semantics aside, I highly recommend the book "Emotional Intelligence" by psychologist Daniel Goleman (even though it's bit dated now), along with its sequals, "Social Intelligence" and "Ecological Intelligence."

There's no such thing as virtue contractarian either, so why not virtue utilitarian? I hold that if it is virtuous of Obama to sacrifice his family for the betterment of his state, it is virtuous of me to do the same for the betterment of the world. It is a virtue to maximize utility.

Lesswrong's Clippy would argue that maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe is the most virtuous thing one can do. Why not? It's a higher ideal.

I don’t know what you are referring to when you speak of my having a “holier than thou” attitude. I take the moral positions that I genuinely feel – if they differ from yours then so be it. I do not allow that it is sanctimonious to speak out against genocide. Perhaps one way to distract yourself from dwelling on the sanctimonious attitude you assume I have would be to confine your attention to my actual arguments and statements regarding the issue, let your perception of my attitude be, and reconcile yourself the to fact that our moral sensitivities differ.

I think it is a bit disingenuous for you to deny promoting Asma’s book. I recently assisted a professor in writing a book that was published last February, and we would have *loved* to have the promotion that you afforded to Asma (see part I): full color photograph of the book’s cover, book title and author’s name mentioned, and a full discussion of the book’s subject matter via a related essay written by the author, albeit with critical analysis by Piety. You seem to take the position that the discussion should have been confined to the two essays. But, need I remind you that I did not introduce Asma’s book into the discussion – you did. You went on to say that the essay would serve as a “summary” of the book you introduced. Now you claim that the book itself is off limits when offering evidence, and deny that your displaying the book and its related information as prominently as you did constitutes promotion?

Nowhere did I use the phrase “justification of genocide” that you put in quotes. But I will not deny that was the thrust of my argument and that Asma attempts to do that.

You wrote that I read Asma “uncharitably”. Yes, I am frequently uncharitable towards people who boastfully speak of their willingness to destroy the whole human race.

Asma says, “I realized that I meant it – I would choke them all”. He then goes on to say it would make no difference if the situation were raised to a million people or the entire population. In other words, he says he is comfortable committing genocide (he says he would do it in a "mircosecond").

To attempt to portray Asma’s statement as some dry discussion of the “strong emotional attachment all mammals have to their offspring” is absurd. It is like portraying Eichmann’s statement, “I laugh when I jump into the grave because of the feeling that I have killed 5,000,000 Jews. That gives me great satisfaction and gratification" as Eichmann reminding people in a hypothetical situation about the value of having a cheerful attitude of acceptance towards mortality.

You criticized (with a holier that thou attitude?) Piety for calling Asma’s writing “incoherent and morally reprehensible tripe”. But I am sorry that you do not express a similar concern for the pro-omnicide statements by Asma that brought on Piety’s critique (and mine).

If he does not, then comments made by myself and Piety are clearly out of line. But if Asma does endorse omnicide, then the comments made (including comparison to Nazis, which you describe as being the “bottom level” of discussion) would be apt and there would be no “charitable” reading towards Asma’s endorsement (unless you want to drop down in a basket from cloud cuckoo land to defend omnicide).

Suppose that Jim makes the following statement: “If there were a button that would kill every Jew on earth, then I would push it in a microsecond”.

Should Jim be read charitably and exonerated on the basis of his making a hypothetical statement? I would say “no”, as it is clear that Jim’s *intention* to kill all the Jews is actual (and reprehensible), while it is only the *means* that Jim is imagining that is hypothetical.

The title of Asma’s book is NOT “Let Me Tell You How Much I Love My Son”, the title is “Against Fairness”. It is “fairness” that is the issue here, not “love of offspring”. Asma is claiming that providing for his son trumps all other considerations, including any obligation to be fair to other people or recognize that others have any rights. It is misleading in the extreme to portray that as a “hypothetical situation to remind people of the strong emotional attachment all mammals have to their offspring”. Neither I nor Piety is denying that people have attachment to their children. They do. The question is whether such attachment allows one to ignore the obligation to respect the rights of others – especially to the point of ignoring the right of others to exist.

For my part, I will be content to quote the relevant passage on omnicide from page 1-2 of Asma’s book (below) and let your readers decide whether Asma asserts that family ties trump others’ right to exist, or if Asma is merely describing a “hypothetical situation to remind people of the strong emotional attachment all mammals have to their offspring”.

Let the readers decide, and I’ll leave it at that.

P.S. I also invite the readers to return to Part One of this discussion and judge whether or not the treatment of Asma’s book there constitutes “promotion” i.e. “the publicization of a product, organization, or venture.”

“I would strangle everyone in this room if it somehow prolonged my son’s life.” That’s what I blurted out into a microphone during a panel discussion on ethics. I was laughing when I said it, but the priest sitting next to me turned sharply in horror and the communist sitting next to him raised her hand to her throat and stared daggers at me. Why was I on a panel with a priest and a revolutionary communist? Long story – not very interesting: we were debating the future of ethics with special attention to the role of religion. The interesting part, however, is that at some point, after we all shook hands like adults and I was on my way home, I realized that I meant it – I would choke them all. Well, of course, one can’t be entirely sure that one’s [i]actions[/i] will follow one’s intentions. The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. But, given some weird [i]Twilight Zone[/i] scenario wherein all their deaths somehow saved my son’s life, I was at least hypothetically committed. The caveman intentions were definitely there.

If some science-fiction sorcerer came to me with a button and said that I could save my son’s life by pressing it, but then (cue the dissonant music) ten strangers would die somewhere…I’d have my finger down on it before he finished his cryptic challenge. If he raised it to one hundred strangers, a million, or the whole population, it would still take the same microsecond for me to push the button.

Yes, and Asma makes an argument that fairness isn’t the no-brainer most people believe. And I agree, within limits, from a virtue ethical perspective.

> Neither I nor Piety is denying that people have attachment to their children. They do. The question is whether such attachment allows one to ignore the obligation to respect the rights of others – especially to the point of ignoring the right of others to exist. <

Within limits, yes. If I had to choose between the life of my daughter or that of another child I would unhesitatingly choose my daughter’s, and I think there are good *moral* reasons for that. But if it were my daughter against ten, or a hundred children, then I would not. And neither would Aristotle, by the way.

> I also invite the readers to return to Part One of this discussion and judge whether or not the treatment of Asma’s book there constitutes “promotion” i.e. “the publicization of a product, organization, or venture.” <

I wish you really got off that particular fixation. Promotion implies endorsement, and I end up criticizing both Asma and Piety by the end of the second piece, so drop it.

> For my part, I will be content to quote the relevant passage on omnicide from page 1-2 of Asma’s book (below) and let your readers decide <

Ah, yes, but do you want readers to go on and read beyond those passages? Because Asma then immediately puts his provocative introductory remark in the context of the emotional lessons he learned when becoming a parent. Then he starts talking about Jesus having favorites and it becomes clear that his actual target is *universal* egalitarianism, and so on. Oh, and a few pages later he refers to the favoritism/egalitarianism divide as a *false* dichotomy, and even rejects Ayn Rand-style selfishness. It doesn’t sound like Hitler to me. Finally — once more — I do *not* agree with his wholesale rejection of egalitarianism anyway, though I do think he has a point in terms of special *moral* duties toward one’s kins and friends.

@Massimo: "nor does anything that Damasio says justify the co-opting of the term “intelligence” and its substitution for the term “maturity” when referring to emotions."So then mature emotions are not based at all on more intelligent strategies learned from experience and adopted by our emotional brain systems? Reread Damasio.

Damasio at bigthink, http://bigthink.com/ideas/23022"And an emotion consists of a very well orchestrated set of alterations in the body that has, as a general purpose, making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity, either/or, or something in between. And it’s something that is set in our genome and that we all have with a certain programmed nature that is modified by our experience so individually we have variations on the pattern."

Massimo said: Interestingly, though, a major characteristic of life in many European countries is that people do practice and value family ties and friendships, despite living in an otherwise Rawlsian environment.

Agreed, but it seems worth pointing out that - compared with other Europeans - the Nordic countries (which, as you pointed out, usually top the list in terms of metrics of social well-being) are - perhaps ironically - more culturally individualistic than others that are more family-based, and also happen to be more secular-minded.

As this report to the World Economic Forum put it:

...data from the World Values Survey [indicate]...that the Nordic countries stand out as a cluster of societies in which people put a strong emphasis on the importance of individual self-realization and personal autonomy. In the language of WVS, the Nordics are characterized by their embrace of “emancipatory self-expression values” on the one hand, and “secular-rational values,” on the other.

and

[Older theories of social trust assume] that trust arises in small, closely-knit communities where there is large degree of interdependence. More recent research has shown, however, that it is precisely the most modern and individualistic countries, most notably the Nordic countries, that are characterized by a broad social trust extended beyond the intimate sphere of family and friends to include other members of society.

> So then mature emotions are not based at all on more intelligent strategies learned from experience and adopted by our emotional brain systems? <

What “intelligent” strategies? And did I not say that emotions and intelligence (in the narrow sense of analytical thinking) do interact constantly in a healthy human being? The quote you posted from Damasio contradicts nothing I’ve said on this topic.

mufi,

> I don't think this info undermines your basic argument. After all, Scandinavians still have families (if more so out-of-wedlock) and friends. Just sayin.' <

No, that’s exactly right. Scandinavian countries are likely the closest (with the possible addition of Japan, in a very different sense) to embody my suggestion of a personal virtue ethics coupled with a society-wide egalitarian type of contractarianism. If only it wasn’t so fracking cold there...

Massimo: Scandinavian countries are likely the closest (with the possible addition of Japan, in a very different sense) to embody my suggestion of a personal virtue ethics coupled with a society-wide egalitarian type of contractarianism.

Yeah, Japan makes for an interesting comparison case here. For example, it rivals Sweden in terms of both "secular-rational values", income equality (in spite of much lower personal tax rates), and social well-being. Yet Sweden is at the extreme in terms of its embrace of "self-expression values" and Japan is closer to the middle of that spectrum, nearer to non-Nordic European countries, like Germany, France, and Spain.

The USA is somewhere in between Japan and Sweden on the "self-expression values" spectrum (closer to Sweden), but on the "secular-rational values" spectrum, the USA is closer to Poland, Romania, and India - in other words, countries that place more emphasis on "the importance of religion, parent-child ties, deference to authority and traditional family values" [source].

Who knows? Perhaps if the culture of the USA were to shift more in the direction of "secular-rational values", which "place less emphasis on religion, traditional family values and authority", it might approach Nordic levels of social well being.

Or, to use your terms, the USA could perhaps use more of an emphasis on a "society-wide egalitarian type of contractarianism" (which seems both secular and rational enough) and less of an emphasis on "personal virtue ethics" (e.g. as currently defined by an austere, but not always so harmonious, combination of conservative Judeo-Christian and liberal economic traditions).

Massimo asks, "What “intelligent” strategies?"Damasio wrote: "making life more survivable by taking care of a danger, of taking care of an opportunity"-"modified by our experience so individually we have variations on the pattern."Taking care of danger for example was the intelligent strategy that not only allowed but caused life on earth to survive and evolve the emotional intelligence that all species, including ours, have found to be the most important functional system that life has.The emotional intelligence in other words that as a term, Massimo, you said "I don’t actually like." And said, "I think we should be talking about emotional maturity." I think emotional maturity means nothing if you don't see maturity as not somehow accidental or automatic, but as an intelligently determined process.

I say, as Patrick said first, and Damasio said before that, emotional maturity is an intelligently determined process. You said it isn't. Even an emotional masochist could, if not should, have recourse to an intelligent process that gets that.

Great article. I like the idea of combining the two. Can't stand some of the trolling I've seen in the comments though (and in other articles written on RT). People need to calm down and argue with some civility.